Mito, magia e iconografia. I sortilegi di Medea nelle stampe di Giovanni Antonio Rusconi per le Trasformationi di Lodovico Dolce

Even though after the famous tragedy of Euripides literary and iconographic sources represent Medea mainly as an infanticide mother, the Medea of the Ovid’s Metamorphoses is above all a powerful sorceress: a wise expert of grasses, by which she prepares effective magic potions, and a skilled manipulator of prodigious recipes, that she activates thanks to the help of hellish divinities, invoked with vocal formulas in her nighttime rites. In the same way, in the woodcuts that decorate the Renaissance editions of the Metamorphoses, particularly in those by Giovanni Antonio Rusconi for the Lodovico Dolce’s Trasformationi, Medea is represented above all as a good-looking sorceress, that executes her sorceries for love or for revenge. Especially in the woodcut with The rejuvenation of Esone, Rusconi combines the features of a Renaissance sorceress with those of a Northern witch: Medea is still an attractive and young woman, but she carries out, by now, magic operations just like a witchcraft